Secret Confessions of a Link-A-Holic

Is it just me or has everyone been becoming a little ‘link obsessed’ lately?

This week I’ve been counting the number of posts I’ve seen written about getting links for your blog – I’m over 40 and still counting.

Posts I’ve seen this week so far have covered:

How to ask for links

What type of links to ask other bloggers for

How to write content that is linkable

What type of links are best

What type of sites to target for links

How to do internal links on your blog

How to get .edu links

Link building tips

Linkbaiting techniques

How to get links that increase traffic

How to buy links effectively

The list goes on…. and on…..

Not only have I seen a lot of posting about links, this week I’ve had around 40 emails from bloggers ‘asking for link exchanges’ (not including all the emails with suggestions for posts that others have written).

So what’s my problem with all the link building articles and exchanging links? Am I ‘anti link?’

No – that’s not it, I believe that SEO has a place in blogging and that one of the most powerful ways to grow in your search engine ranking is to build incoming links to your site. I’ve written many times about this and have covered a lot of the topics in the list above here at ProBlogger. I value the incoming links that I have to my blogs and would like to see their numbers keep growing.

However this week my alarm bells have been going off and I’m starting to wonder if we (as a blogging community) might be getting a little distracted from…. from…. well blogging itself.

2. Blog well and the links will follow

This might be easy for me to say as a reasonably established blogger – but I’m a big believer in the principle. How do most of the top bloggers going around build their readership? From talking to a few of them I’d humbly suggest that the main thing in their favor was that they built blogs with compelling content which engaged their readers – the links followed.

My Secret Link Obsession

Let me let you in on a little secret. I’m a recovering link-a-holic.

In my early days of blogging I stumbled across the idea of incoming links as the key to SEO and so I began a campaign of gathering links to my blogs (at the time I only had a couple).

I wasn’t all that blog-savvy at the time and so did a pretty crude job of it (I bought a few links, I tried to exchange links, I got into listing my blogs in directories) but I managed to increase the numbers of links to my blogs over time. In the process here’s what else happened:

My posting frequency dropped

Readers became frustrated with my content (which was obviously linkbait)

I lost some of my passion for blogging and my topic

I sold out content wise (started picking topics to write about that didn’t really add value to my blog)

It wasn’t until I took a step back from blogging for a week at one point that I realized how distracted I’d become and how the very thing that I thought would ‘make’ my blog was in danger of killing it.

I decided to focus again on my readers and on producing content that would be useful to them and in doing so saw a reversal in all of the above points.

Do I think about incoming links these days as a blogger? Yes I do – they are one aspect of blogging that is important. However as a recovering link-a-holic I attempt to keep that side of my blogging well in check. I think my blogs and I are in a lot better shape for it.

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Comments

I don’t know much about link exchanges. Does it inadvertantly promote the blog to a different theme / category in Alexa, google etc ?

Meaning if I am doing a fitness blog, and someone puts my link on his/her site which is a news blog, will my related links in Alexa try to categorize my blog also as a news blog, when it is not ? Hope this question makes sense.

Very familiar stuff. Thanks for an interesting entry. I’m an utterly unambitious blogger (commenting on ProBlogger, I know). My blog is fairly schizophrenic – there’s no red line whatsoever. Yet I find that there’s two things that really excite me about the blogging experience:

1. The writing experience itself and the joy of writing for an audience.

2. The thrill of analyzing my visitor statistics. I’ll probably never earn a single dollar off my blog, but I think it’s great fun trying to find new ways to get hits. A few of my posts are shameless (and completely unsuccessful) attempts to attract an audience, but most posts are based on genuine interests and experiences. And should my blog against all odds suddenly become a huge hit, I’ll likely get Adsense up and going in a matter of hours – me hungrily analyzing the stats every two hours…

Point is: To me both aspects are perfectly good reasons to be blogging. No. 2 even more so if the blog actually had profit potential. And somehow I imagine most pro bloggers must feel the same way? Mr. Rowse, even though you’re a recovering link-a-holic, you’re still slightly obsessed, aren’t you??

I agree…I have had the same experience in the initial phase of my blog. Metrics and linking used to take up more time than blogging. The problem is even after realizing the problem, it’s difficult to get out of it…sort of becomes a vicious circle…no incoming links hence the increasing need to linkbait…excessive linkbaiting leads to even less backlinks. While I agree that content rules, I have seen many good bloggers with great content getting almost zero attention. I guess that’s what forces them to indulge linkbaiting.

I have a few blogs among which areBlogger Tips and TricksDummies Guide to Google Blogger
I do get a lot of comments, some of them are complements, and most of them are question related to blogging. I do respond to the comments, and after doing that, I go to the commentator’s blog to leave a comment to thank him/her for leaving a comment with a link to the post and letting him/her know that I have responded to the comment. And I leave a signature line with a link to a blog that I hope will help people become more environmentally concious.

As another recovering linkaholic I have to agree there’s just too much noise out there that suggests the biggest secret to a profitable blog is back links, it’s simply not true any more and I personally love the fact that I can get on with writing rather than trying to invent ever more cunning link bait techniques.

Linkaholic cold turkey is tough but it’s worth it when you realise you’ve gone for months without checking your stats to see what you latest bank link count is, or had a mild panic attack when you’ve dropped a typo in one of your domain name checks and seen a big fat zero!

What problogger is saying is that, yes, links are important but if that becomes your focus, you’ve lost the most important thing. Not only that, but linking needs to be natural, such as posting insights in related blogs. I find it is better to consistantly post just a few times a week to someone elses blog CONSISTANTLY than trying to go crazy over a few days.. Thats when you’ll really get burned out.

Find a blog you actually LIKE and write comments on articles that actually INTEREST you. Over a few years you’ll find your ranking and readership growing.

Too often people get GREEDY trying to ramp up their page views ‘overnight’… Thats when things go south. Both your writing quality and ranking go DOWN!

The debate on the effect of links is never ending. No one will ever agree on the true effects of links whether reciprocal or inbound.
The bottom line is that your rate of inbound link growth determines the amount of traffic you get.

Is it not more a chick and egg issue? You make a site and there are no paths in so no one can find it so no one can link to it so that people can find it and link to it…

There is a sort of critical mass of linkage and content that must be reached before a blog can do anything. When starting fresh you will find that in short order you must link from any other work you stuill have access to, submit to search engines, get in dmos and join forums and communities and chat a good chat with you link at the ready as an answer of illustration whenever possible.

It’s not something you have to do forever but it is something you have to do. In any given week as many as one in twenty of your readers might link to you. But when you have three readers if you count granny you really are not going to ever get links.

I have just read your post. and may I say I am impressed! I, too, am a link addict and a button addict too! The addiction tends to screw up the real reason why i began blogging in the first place, i.e., to be the premiere content source of everything related to the Philippine pool scene and around the world. Your article is an inspiration to me, and to people just like us. For this, I am forever in your debt. More power to you! Mabuhay!

I’ve taken a can’t worry about my blog count attitude. I post every day on an eclectic field of topics, and people (I hope) will come. I have links to people who interest me, I comment when I find something intriguing. It’s my blog, not my life – though the blog is ABOUT my life.

I’m glad I found this site. I am not so clear on building links, and I do love writing. In fact, the idea of the blog is to promote the writing I love to do. So now I know to keep writing and stay away from hard linking…or at least, not to inhale when I am around it.

we all get carried away once in a while. We focus on one aspect more than others. The famous quote applies here, “over commit and then disappoint”
we over commit our time to things that aren’t important and don’t give value to anyone other than the idea that you at least did something.

I’ve had to ask the question.
-is what I would like to do going to help me reach my goal?
-What is going to be the ROI?
-How is it going to do this and would I be able to confince someone off the street with this information?

we all get carried away once in a while. We focus on one aspect more than others. The famous quote applies here, “over commit and then disappoint”
we over commit our time to things that aren’t important and don’t give value to anyone other than the idea that you at least did something.

I’ve had to ask the questions.
-is what I would like to do going to help me reach my goal?
-What is going to be the ROI?
-How is it going to do this and would I be able to confince someone off the street with this information?

I have been link building on some of my sites for 12 years. I have one site with over 1,400 natural links all built through good content. I did ask for a few but not many. Don’t try to beat the system. You can still rank in niche areas without many links.

I had been wandering over the internet for backlinking methods, came up a post of yours about backlinking which brought me here. And I think this is the best article. I should focus more on quality blogging instead of backlinking!

[…] Excellent post on Problogger that talks about how Darren (the webmaster) went through a phase of working really hard on improving his inbound links, to the detriment of the quality of his blog. Makes good reading especially the lessons learnt. Incoming links are important, but like everything in life, focusing just on one thing, to the detriment of everything else, can be a very bad thing. […]

[…] Inspiration has hit after reading all the way through this thread on Darren’s ProBlogger.com. I’m immediately going to register RecoveringBlogger.com (yeah it is available so if YOU really want it, be my guest ;), just don’t tell my friend, Steve over at TechquilaShots.com about my getting yet another new domain! ) […]

[…] Secret Confessions of a Link-A-Holic Coming from Darren Rowes on why one should not become obsessed about link buildings. It is all about putting the content first – blog well builds the foundation for which success can follow – linking is secondary. […]

[…] Problogger has an interesting article on the dangers of spending too much time on trying to build incoming links to your website. He points out: Give it some attention by all means – but keep things in balance and realize that of all the factors that make up a successful blog – incoming links is at best midway through the list. […]

[…] How do you KNOW? For me, it’s when I get things in 3’s. For example, I was getting frustrated with the pace of things with the blog. So, I journalled about it on Sunday. I felt I was doing all this stuff and moving further and further away from the intent. After free-form writing for about 30 minutes, which I had not done in about 3 months, I realized how much I loved writing. Ideas started pouring in again. Later on, I was on the phone with my cousin and she mentioned how much my aunt (one of my heroes) in Trinidad loves my blog. So much so that she’s asking for a blog of her own. Then, I opened up Bloglines to read my daily feeds and discovered that Darren wrote about turning the focus of blogging back to, well, blogging. […]